My wife grew up in the USSR, and was granted asylum in the US shortly before the USSR collapsed.
She is not interested in politics at all, but was listening to the radio the other day and heard an ad from RIAA offering cash rewards to snitch on your neighbors for downloading music illegally.
Her jaw dropped and she said “I can’t believe they are doing this in the US. This is exactly how the KGB worked in the Soviet Union.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHD5nd3QLTg]
Welcome to the USSA?
You say your wife is completely uninterested in politics, but she asked for and received political asylum. This is a political decision on her part. Thus, she is at least a little interested in politics, even if she would deny it when asked.
I have a question for both of you. There is not necessarily one correct answer, so you each may have different answers and yet each have an answer that is personally correct for you.
The question is, do you know what was meant by the following words when they were written and published by their author … and if not, what would your best guess be?
I will give you a hint also. I would suggest that the text is at least partly autobiographical for the author.
Thanks for sharing your family history and for your interest in reading my words.
–RTF
Here is the text I referred to.
In the town where I was born,
Lived a man who sailed to sea.
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines.
So we sailed on to the Sun
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine.
We all live in a yellow submarine,
a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine [. . . .]
And our friends are all aboard.
Many more of them live next door.
And the band begins to play.
(Trumpets play)
[. . .]
As we live a life of ease, (life of ease)
Every one of us (every one of us) has all we need. (has all we need)
Sky of blue (sky of blue) and sea of green, (sea of green)
In our yellow (In our yellow) submarine.(submarine) ( Haha! )
We all live [. . .]
Religious asylum
Excuse me, I stand corrected. Still, when one is dealing with secular governments, there is a political element to that as well.
Yeah everything is politics. Think I have heard that before.
I didn’t say what you are attributing to me. I actually said the exact opposite.
RTF,
McCartney said the following about the lyrics.
“We were trying to write a children’s song. That was the basic idea. And there’s nothing more to be read into it than there is in the lyrics of any children’s song.”
Ah, mockery! Make like he doesn’t know that. I shouldn’t be surprised. Uh, let’s see, we need an ad-hom, but we need it to be one our friends won’t recognize as such, since that could destroy the trance we have them in….
RTF
People still have some romantic feelings about the U.S.S.R. Here is a link to the band “Soviet Sex” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD-GqGL0HYM
In reality life in the U.S.S.R. was miserable. The spying on ordinary civilians was even worse in the satellite state D.D.R. (East Germany). The Secret Service there, called Stasi, has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Interesting,that is also how the Gestapo operated. I saw a good documentary on the history channel about 12 years ago, and inveigators were perplexed because only 2 Gestapo agents managed a town of 500,000. An old German woman explained they did it by having the population spy on their neighbors. She said it deteriorated as the years went by, people would label someone as having been a “Jewish sympathizer” when they had some everyday grievance like a neighbor making too much noise at night, and a lot of people got taken away to the death camps this way. This is going on in the USA today on multiple levels, corporations, and of course the Feds wanting you keeping your eye out for terrorists and drug dealers, but also local governments. In Albuquerque the city government encourages lots of spying on neighbors, having weeds to high or watering their lawns too much, or owning too many dogs. Recently a man got hit with a $700 water fine or watering his trees too much. This is no longer the USA we celebrate in the mythology of Independence Day.
There are the big three: RIAA and MPAA and BSA ( audio, video, software ), all are private industry NGO’s, but thanks to relentless lobbying, they are now an elevated and protected class, and government jackboots act as their enforcement arms. Some boneheaded judge rubber stamps their allegation and the FBI or SWAT teams can kick down doors looking for DVD or software, take every computer they find, and shred multiple parts of the Constitution at once. Lots of (D)s and (R)s did this to us, DMCA was but the camel nose under the tent.
But why should we be surprised? Microsoft and Verizon and Facebook and Apple and many more became lapdog “partners” along the way. In fact, Microsoft was the first “partner”, which is exactly like Google bending over for the Chinese regime. There are but a handful of ISPs that enable Internet access and they are all in bed with the feds in multiple positions. Even ICANN who manages domain names is now involved, having recently agreed to eliminate anonymity for domain owners. And this is but the tip of the iceberg. Thus, the Internet and the Personal Computer itself have almost been completely taken over by Big Brother now. It’s a brave new world.
The sad thing is that the people still have the power to do something. Over the course of any six year interval the electorate can send 535 + 2 completely new faces to Washington. That is a clean slate. If they sent them down there with strict instructions to fire the entire existing bureaucracy ( union contracts be damned ) then there would be a fresh start without any surviving institutional memory to poison the well.
That would be the easy way. But the powers-that-be are dug in like ticks and fight dirty for self-preservation by segmenting the citizenry, favoring some, punishing others, keeping the people off-balance and incapable of helping themselves.
Needless to say people like your wife are exactly who we need to be listening to. They’ve been there and are detached enough to see the devil in plain sight. So many Americans are blind to things that they are exposed to day after day. An outsider can walk in and spot these invisible things easily. You lurking liberals should listen to these folks.
But the businesses these NGOs represent probably dwarf the Soviet GDP.
Reblogged this on The Firewall.
Find RIAA’s call odd to repulsive but since it does not have enforcement muscle behind it, as yet perhaps, not scary.
Elizabethan England was also a snitch society. Amazingly the records of these snitches still exists in archives. Citizens were encouraged to spy on one another and report any suspicious activities to the authorities. As someone mentioned above, this kind of reporting eventually is abused by all and ends in failure and misery.
Long live the NSA.
Even the 3rd Amendment is now being abused.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/171888/
“The nationwide “If You See Something, Say Something™” public awareness campaign – is a simple and effective program to raise public awareness of indicators of terrorism and terrorism-related crime, and to emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious activity to the proper local law enforcement authorities. The campaign was originally used by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which has licensed the use of the slogan to DHS for anti-terrorism and anti-terrorism crime related efforts.”
http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something-campaign
Nobody loves a snitch. But on the other hand, who fingered the Times Square Bomber back in 2010? Homeland Security teams? Nope. It was two alert street vendors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt
“I can’t believe they are doing this in the US.“I can’t believe they are doing this in the US.
Hey at least we missed out on the Cheka massacres, the Holodomor, and the Gulags.
They had to go soft on us to get us to go along.